Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

Alone at the Altar

Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Brianna Leavitt-Alc¿ara is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 312
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Januar 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 544g
• ISBN-13: 9781503603684
• ISBN-10: 1503603687
• Artikelnr.: 47776024

Autorenporträt

Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This chapter introduces the book's methodology, arguments, and scholarly
significance. Most works on women and early modern religion focus on nuns,
holy women, or religious "deviants," and emphasize rising hostility toward
female autonomy as officials moved to enclose unmarried women and intensive
female religiosity (e.g. mysticism, asceticism). This book takes a
different approach and examines ordinary laywomen, particularly the broad
population of non-elite women who frequently lived outside of both marriage
and convent in colonial Spanish American cities. Through an analysis of
approximately 550 wills, as well as a variety of other source materials
such as hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records,
this study argues that the complex alliances forged between non-elite
single women and the Catholic Church shaped local religion and the
spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence
politics in Guatemala's capital.
1City of Women, City of God: Poor, Single, and Holy in Santiago de
Guatemala
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 examines the hagiography of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús
who migrated to Guatemala's capital in the late seventeenth century. While
the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure,
obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a
poor abandoned wife and mother. And although Church decrees clearly
required actively religious laywomen to live in cloistered communities,
Anna became an independent beata (laywoman who took informal vows) and
Jesuit tertiary. This chapter explores Anna's lived religious experience as
a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female
mysticism and devotional networks, and her alliances with powerful priests
and religious orders. It also places Anna's story within the context of
late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala,
particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as
movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety.
2Unlikely Allies: Missionaries and Laywomen
chapter abstract
Evidence from wills highlight the striking number of non-elite women living
outside of marriage who successfully professed as lay Franciscan
tertiaries, that is, as members of the powerful Franciscan Third Order.
Chapter 2 explores how and why priests in Guatemala's colonial capital,
especially Franciscans and Jesuits, allied with poor single and widowed
laywomen and supported active and unenclosed female religiosity. Santiago
de Guatemala's status as a distant provincial capital, removed from the
Inquisition's close oversight and without the institutional resources
necessary to enforce female enclosure, led to greater tolerance of lay
female religiosity and single women compared to larger cities like Mexico
City and Lima. At the same time, global missionary movements forged diverse
models of female piety and sustained support for active female ministries.
These findings suggest the need to modify interpretations of early modern
Catholicism as primarily hostile towards single women and lay female
religiosity.
3Sex, Honor, and Devotion
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 traces how non-elite single women navigated their moral status
and developed alliances with the Catholic Church in the shifting religious
landscape between 1700 and 1770. Although scholars have examined the ways
in which elite women in colonial Spanish America took advantage of
loopholes and the distance between public honor and private sexual matters,
the experiences of non-elite women remain unclear. Wills highlight how
laboring unmarried women invoked feminine ideals other than chastity and
enclosure through their enthusiastic participation in confraternities and
Third Orders, contributions to the spiritual economy as pious benefactors,
and complex alliances with local priests. Much as scholars recognize that
race in colonial Latin America was a flexible category and individuals
might count multiple racial identities simultaneously or change their
racial identity over time, these findings illustrate how poor single women
took advantage of alternative feminine ideals and claimed moral status
within their communities.
4To Educate and Evangelize: Laywomen, Clergy, and Late-Colonial Girls'
Schools
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 examines the case studies of three new primary schools for
non-elite girls in and around late-colonial Guatemala City, as locals
called the recently relocated capital. These educational initiatives
illustrate both change and continuity, blurring the perceived battle lines
between baroque and enlightened pieties. Enlightened feminine ideals based
on the social utility of educated mothers and Bourbon reform efforts
operated in conjunction with on-going alliances between laywomen and clergy
and an attachment to monastic models of feminine piety. These schools also
show how laywomen acted as pioneers and innovators, shaping educational
reform through creative engagement with Bourbon reforms, Enlightenment
ideas, and progressive Catholicism. The formation of Guatemala City's
"Teacher's College" for native women in the Beaterio de Indias also
challenged entrenched racial ideologies and illustrates a critical shift
toward acknowledging native laywomen's capacity to serve as teachers and
spiritual leaders.
5The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 explores the devotion and controversy surrounding Sor María
Teresa Aycinena, a Carmelite nun, who in 1816 in the midst of the
Independence wars, reportedly began to experience the stigmata, visions,
mystical crucifixions, and miraculous images formed with the blood of her
wounds. The powerful archbishop, priests, and lay devotees, many of them
women, supported the Carmelite nun as a holy woman, but her divine
revelations fueled controversy and political conflicts. Modern scholars
treat the case only in passing, accepting the liberal nineteenth-century
view that Sor María Teresa and her lay devotees were conservative political
pawns. This case certainly highlights the early politicization of networks
between priests and laywomen, but it also reveals how religious motivations
significantly shaped clerical support of the mystic nun, while the Church's
weakened position created openings for assertive female claims to spiritual
authority and a renewal of devotions long popular with laywomen.
6"With Knives Drawn": Gender, Devotion, and Politics After Independence
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 analyzes how non-elite women outside of marriage navigated the
shifting religious and political landscape in the decades after
Independence. Laboring women undeniably faced new challenges, including
their exclusion from republican citizenship, pastoral instability, and the
decline of confraternities, which undermined traditional forms of spiritual
and social support, and the renewed emphasis upon female sexual purity by
both Church and State. While laboring women could not live up to the elite
ideal of "Republican Motherhood," they found new ways of establishing their
moral status as public defenders of the faith. Their actions shaped the
development of popular conservatism in Guatemala, which successfully
reigned from 1838 to 1871. Non-elite women also forged alliances with
Jesuit missionaries and took advantage of new devotional opportunities as
nineteenth-century Church officials, more dependent than ever upon
laywomen, mostly abandoned early modern restrictions on active lay female
religiosity.
Epilogue
chapter abstract
The Epilogue considers how the Liberal Reform Era of the 1870s,
dramatically undermined both laboring single women and the Catholic Church.
Liberals directly undermined laboring women's economic opportunities,
enhanced male privileges, and promoted an exclusive nuclear family ideal,
and at the same time targeted laywomen's longtime devotional allies,
expelling male religious orders, closing female convents, and abolishing
lay brotherhoods, Third Orders, and most public displays of religiosity.
But by the 1920s, a lay-led religious revival, supported by the Vatican,
was underway and dozens of new Catholic associations emerged specifically
for women. Today, laboring women are at the forefront of a new spiritual
revival in Guatemala City, the rise of Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and
charismatic Catholicism. This study's long historical perspective suggests
that the success of these movements derives from their ability to build
upon Guatemala's local religion, particularly forms of devotional
expression and networking historically favored by laboring women.